4 Ways The Best Leadership Teams Deliver Amazing Results

An effective leadership team is essential for an organization to have sustained success. The leadership team is the only group with the positional authority to set strategy, make organization-wide decisions, and allocate the necessary resources to enable the organization to continually adapt and evolve to serve its vision and mission better.

Leadership teams can easily get caught in the trap of spending most of their time together sharing general updates, addressing urgent issues, and creating space for employees and projects to get leadership exposure. These activities are valuable and necessary, but not when they are at the expense of the team accomplishing its most strategic tasks.?

The best leadership teams are deliberate about prioritizing their time and energy to ensure they focus on the most strategic aspects of their collective role. These most strategic responsibilities focus on ensuring long-term success, establishing culture, developing employees, improving efficiencies, building strategic partnerships, leveraging emerging opportunities, and advancing innovation.?

4 Ways Leadership Teams Ensure Strategic Goals Become Results

1. Focus On Their Fewest Most Important Tasks

President Eisenhower said "I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent." Too often, leadership teams spend the most time working on the least important things and the least time on the most important things.

Understanding the distinction between urgent and strategic is important for a leadership team to be successful. The challenge is that urgent activities demand the leadership team's time because they are more visible, immediate, and louder than their strategic tasks.?

Because there will always be urgent activities trying to steal a leadership team's time, leadership teams must build in time and process for working on their most strategic responsibilities for long-term organizational success. Establishing a recurring leadership team meeting that focuses on assessing, problem-solving, and supporting the organization's fewest, most important strategic goals and operational metrics is crucial to long-term organizational success.?

2. Keep A Visible And Up-To-Date?Scorecard

What gets measured gets done! A leadership team needs a scorecard to keep track of progress, so the team, organization, and employees understand if they are winning or losing. The two key areas that a leadership team's scorecard should track are the progress made toward strategic goals and critical organizational metrics.?

Strategic Goals

Clearly defined, communicated, and measured strategic goals provide employees and the organization with clarity during complexity, higher performance, and common purpose. Strategic goals focus on the following areas:

• Building a healthy culture and organizational effectiveness
• Developing and motivating employees
• Building strategic partnerships
• Creating opportunities for future growth
• Solving big emerging problems
• Developing new capacities
• Innovating to advance the vision and mission?
• Creating efficiencies and scalability

Critical Organizational Metrics

Critical Organizational Metrics, sometimes called Key Performance Indicators, measure general health regarding people, finances, learning, and organizational operations. Leadership teams should look at the top 5-12 metrics that provide the most insight into their organization's overall health and productivity. This scorecard should be up-to-date, simple, visible, and reviewed during the recurring Leadership Team meeting that focuses on the progress of the strategic goals and key operational metrics.

3.??Problem-Solve Important Issues

The best leadership teams are great at problem-solving. Resolving critical issues that get in the way of accomplishing strategic goals should be the central component of a leadership team's recurring meeting focus. Below are 3 leadership team practices for great problem-solving.

1. Defined Process For Problem-Solving - An inclusive and effective problem-solving process enables team members to understand how to engage when addressing issues or opportunities collectively. A defined process also allows the team to continually improve their collective problem-solving ability.?
2. Dedicated Time For Problem-Solving - Addressing the problems that get in the way of the organization achieving its most important goals should be the central component of a leadership team's recurring meetings. To ensure the team has sufficient time to focus on problem-solving, a leadership team's recurring meeting agenda should include dedicated time for resolving issues and making decisions.
3. Prioritize Their Most Important Issues Before Problem-Solving - An "issue" is a problem, obstacle, barrier, idea, or opportunity that impacts the success of accomplishing your most important goals. Too often, teams spend most of their time on the first issues that arise, leaving little or no time for problem-solving their most strategic challenges or opportunities.??

4. Establish A Culture Of?Accountability

After problem-solving, actions are created to address identified issues. Each action item should have clearly defined responsibilities, support needed, timeline, and how to communicate ongoing progress to provide the necessary clarity and accountability for success. Action items should be reviewed at the beginning of each recurring team meeting to assess progress and next steps.

Accountability allows team members to count on each other, whether meeting deadlines or fulfilling duties. The most effective teams understand that accountability is the key to high motivation levels, mutual trust, and performance.

A Leadership Team’s Most Important Resource

The most important decision a leadership team will make is how to invest their most valuable resources: Time and Energy. One of the biggest challenges leadership teams face is finding enough time to focus on the most strategic parts of their roles. Leadership teams must learn to say “No” to good projects, tasks, and requests that steal their energy and focus away from accomplishing their most important priorities.

Leadership teams must be responsive to urgent requests, but not at the expense of moving forward with their most important goals. The most effective leadership teams have learned to "use their noes to protect their more important yeses."

NOTE: Tony Gambill previously published this article with Forbes Leadership Strategy on 01/06/24.

? Learn more about my bio, content, and services at www.clearviewleaders.com

? Read more of my articles on Self-Leadership and Leading Others at my Forbes Leadership Strategy Homepage

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:?Tony Gambill is the President of ClearView Leadership, an innovative leadership and talent development consulting firm helping organizations, executives, and managers bring practical skills to Self-Leadership and Leading Others. He is the author of, Getting It Right When It Matters Most: Self-Leadership for Work & Life.